[teampractices] How deviantART organizes its work

[Steven Walling]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Shahyar Ghobadpour <
sghobadpour at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> I'm a bit late to this conversation, but figured I'd chime in, as a
> former deviantART engineer. I don't recall the exact number, but I
> believe we were about 50-60 engineers. And yes, as Erik mentioned,
> that post is a bit dated, but not a whole lot has changed in terms of
> _how_ the teams work. They changed software along the way, but the
> general practices remained the same. I'm getting to the end of my
> first week here at WMF, and I can discuss a bit about how things are
> different.
>

Thank you for sharing. All this is extremely helpful.


>  dA uses Mumble for large meetings, and Skype for chat and small
> meetings, versus our use of Hangouts for meetings and IRC for chat.
> There are pros and cons to each of these, and while we always
> complained about Skype, the major benefit of it is that even if you're
> offline, you can still be messaged, and people can still talk to/about
> you in a chat room -- you will receive the entire chat room and
> private messaging history upon your next login. This is a bit of an
> annoyance with IRC. I think I'll have to get more used to emailing
> people here.
>

The solution many of us use for this problem is an IRC bouncer. I'm
actually connected all the time in IRC even when my laptop and/or client is
closed, so I get messages and scrollback etc.

One of the things that keeps us stuck in IRC land is that it's not just an
internal company tool. It's also deeply embedded in the Wikimedia
community, even among a segment of "non-technical" community members. We
used to actually hold IRC office hours (you can look up the logs on Meta)
as general community chats, though this is slowly dying out as a
communication practice.


>
> Almost everyone is remote, which means everyone is _always_ in chat,
> and from timezones around the globe. And when they're not, they are
> usually easy to get ahold of via email. This makes for easy
> integration into work as a remotee, because someone is always around
> to answer your question. There's global rooms (for departments, and
> general chit-chat), and smaller rooms (for teams/projects).
>
> All developers are full-stack, which allows them to easily move
> between teams / new short- and long-term projects. Typically, people
> start in Reactor, then move onto other teams for various amounts of
> time. The first things you do in Reactor are easy bug fixes and one
> major code refactor. That major code refactor can take days or weeks;
> you keep committing code for review, and as concerns are raised, you
> fix them and keep committing until finally someone approves your code
> for landing. This is the process for almost all code; rarely does
> something significant get pushed without being reviewed.
>
>
> The big difference is that they use Phabricator to manage code
> (including review), commits (including auditing), unit testing, as
> well as bugs and features. I see you last really looked into it in
> 2012, and the main reason for not using it was the lack of permission
> controls. As of November 2013, they've had per-object access
> restriction in place, so I'm thinking it might be time to give it
> another look. I can flat out tell you that Phabricator is by far the
> best project/code/bug management system I have ever used, and I've
> gone through at least half a dozen of them over the past few years.
> It's a huge improvement in terms of productivity, since all the
> features are integrated together in one single tool, and the interface
> makes things like issue tracking, code review, and feature discussion
> a LOT easier to do.
>
> Things like Bugzilla and IRC were the de facto standards for
> open-source communities in the past. I think we're stuck in that
> mindset, and should be looking at more contemporary solutions. I would
> really like to discuss this with everyone, and see if we can
> reevaluate Phabricator for our needs this year. I think we could be
> working a lot more efficiently by switching to it.
>

Having played with their test version, I'd definitely be happy moving to
Phabricator as a replacement for Bugzilla, IRC, and maybe even
Trello/Mingle.



-- 
Steven Walling,
Product Manager
https://wikimediafoundation.org/
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